Twelve

Amtrak's Zephyr pulled into Mount Pleasant, Iowa, at 8:40 A.M., right on time. Joe Service had been awakened in good time by Mr. Alonzo Johnson, who knocked softly on the door of suite A/B. He had risen and bathed and shaved, and Mr. Johnson had brought him a bottle of champagne, nicely chilled, along with a carafe of coffee. Joe was grateful. Three days earlier he had ridden into Oakland from Los Angeles on the Coast Starlight, and it had not been fun. That train had been overcrowded with noisy people. There had been a long wait at the dining car, and there were no vacant seats in the lounge. The Zephyr was a much better ride. For one thing he'd spent the night in San Francisco, a city he liked, and he'd been able to provision himself properly. He had boarded the Zephyr with one bag and a newly purchased canvas carryall filled with fresh sourdough French bread, various cheeses, several bottles of wine and Perrier water, and a plastic sack full of fresh fish.

After establishing himself in the suite, Joe had slipped down to the galley and conferred with the chef. This was a large black man named Walker who at first was not inclined to listen to Joe. But Joe pressed a significant amount of cash into his hand, as well as the bag, filled with sea bass.

“It's the morning catch,” Joe explained. “I bought it right off the boat. Now I understand you are serving sole for dinner, and I know from experience that it is very good, but I just had this yen for sea bass. There's plenty for you, if you like that sort of thing . . .” There was enough for the whole galley crew, in fact.

“That's all right, bro,” Chef Walker said. “I grill it with my own special sauce, kind of a Cajun sauce that I learned in New Iberia. Just let the maître d’ know when you come in.”

Next Joe had gone to Mr. Johnson, a very pleasant gentleman, and placed fifty dollars in his hand, along with six bottles of French champagne and six bottles of California chardonnay. Joe explained to him that he needed at least two bottles of the champagne daily, before breakfast and with lunch. There was also the Havarti and the Cheshire, a Brie and a Wensleydale, all of which needed to be refrigerated. He would nibble on them en route, along with a bunch each of red and green grapes, a melon, and some oranges. Alonzo Johnson cheerfully agreed to place all of these provisions in the cooler and to bring them to him as required.

Joe went up to the lounge for the run up to Suisun Bay and the Sacramento River. He enjoyed the cormorants and herons flying up as the train ran smoothly and swiftly past the mothball fleet of World War II warships. The train was not overcrowded, and Joe reveled in the peculiar, smug sensation that he always felt when a two- or three-day train journey commenced.

Later they began to climb up into the Sierras, and Joe relaxed in his spacious suite with magazines and an excellent caper novel by Donald Westlake. He detrained for a minute at Truckee, relishing the mountain air and ogling a party of attractive women on the main street, a young sultry blonde and her eagle-eyed mother and a strapping six-foot blonde with her slim and sexy mother. There was no time to pursue adventure. He reboarded and dined on Chef Walker's splendid version of bass, with garlic and onions and a hot, spicy wine sauce. The sauce was really too much for the bass, he thought, but it was good. He drank a bottle of .the chardonnay.

The Rockies were great the next day, especially the stretch through the Glenwood canyon and then the run through the Moffat Tunnel before they thundered down into Denver. But he spent most of his time in his suite, cleaning guns and joyfully reflecting on his successful liaison with Jizzy. She had shown him more than the expected forwarding telephone number for Hal Good. There was an actual street address in Iowa City. Joe could hardly believe it. Surely this couldn't be Good's home address? Well, he would check it out, but it seemed awfully lax for a presumably competent professional hit man.

As for Jizzy . . . well, Jizzy had been superb. He would remember her fondly for days, even weeks. Maybe some day, when he had amassed enough capital and could live on his investments and give up this goofy life, he would give her a ring and they could get together.

On the morning of the third day, in Mount Pleasant, Joe apologized to Mr. Johnson for leaving the suite in such disorder. There was a bottle each of champagne and chardonnay left, and he commended them to Alonzo, along with another portrait of Ulysses S. Grant.

It was a cool spring day in the farm country. All the snow was gone, but the plowmen were not yet in the wet fields. Joe thought about renting a car, but there was none to rent, a possibility that had not occurred to him. He abandoned the new canvas carryall against the wall of a bar, walked out onto the highway, and stood there with his one remaining bag. Within minutes a stout young farm lad wearing a Simplot cap and driving a splendid four-by-four Jimmy pickup truck with jumbo wheels stopped for him. He wasn't going far, but he got on his CB radio and started calling. Within seconds a trucker northbound on the same highway, just a few miles south of them, responded. The farm lad explained that Joe was going to Iowa City and would be left at milepost 67. “I'll be looking for him, ten-four,” the trucker said.

Joe thanked the farmer when he dropped him off and took up his stance next to milepost 67 in the fresh breeze, delighted to be in this excellent and accommodating country. Sure enough, about eight minutes later an enormous semi rig came howling up the line, and as he roared by Joe, he blasted his air horn twice. The wind of his passing nearly knocked Joe down. Crestfallen, he stared after the huge truck as it echoed away up the next hill. Then he laughed. Not ten minutes later a salesman in a new Buick stopped. He was headed for Cedar Rapids, on the other side of Iowa City. He had all his clothes hanging on a rack across the backseat, and Joe had to put his bag under his legs in front. He also had to listen to the salesman's philosophy of life, which seemed largely a condemnation of “niggers, hippies, an’ dope-a-dicks.” All the while the tape deck screamed out songs by Barbara Mandrell. Still, in less than forty minutes he was in Coralville, a kind of suburb of Iowa City.

Here Joe was able to rent a car, a Ford Escort, and he drove over to Iowa City, where he quickly found Black Street. The street ran up a hill off the Iowa River. The house he was looking for turned out to be a simple white frame house next to a park. There was a driveway on one side, with an unattached garage. In the drive was a four-by-four Blazer. A fifteen-foot fiberglass launch with a huge outboard motor sat on a trailer next to the garage, covered with a blue tailor-made canvas cover. Joe parked the Ford next to the little park and watched a buxom blond woman throw a Frisbee to her even blonder four-year-old girl. Joe got out and leaned against the fender in the pleasant spring sunlight. Inevitably the Frisbee came his way, and Joe picked it up, spinning it back to the woman. Eventually she walked back with the child, a very pretty young girl, and said, “Hi,” with a broad smile.

“Hey, are you a student?” Joe asked her.

“No,” she said.

“I'm looking for a buddy, from the navy,” Joe said. “He gave me his address, but I lost it. He said he lived on Black Street. His name is Hal?”

“Hal?” the woman said. “I don't know any Hal. What does he look like?”

“About my age,” Joe said, “kind of slim, a little taller than me. Fair hair?”

“There's a guy sort of like that who lives over there,” said the woman, pointing to the white house with the boat. “I don't know his name. He's a cop, I think. Is your friend a cop?”

“A cop? No way. Maybe your husband knows him.” Joe walked across the street with the woman to the gate of her little house.

“Husband? I seem to have misplaced my husband,” the woman said, sizing up Joe in a frank, amused way. She had a narrow, attractive face with a small, expressive mouth and nice blue eyes. She had a way of standing with a hand on her hip. The little girl squinted up at Joe with the same blue eyes, but with a slightly sidelong look that was endearing.

Joe leaned on the picket fence. “Well, maybe we could have a beer or something.” He grinned pleasantly.

“Some other time,” the woman said. She nodded at the little girl. “I've got things to do.”

“Well, thanks anyway.” Joe strolled off to a little shopping plaza a block away and looked up Hal Good in the telephone directory. There was no listing; He returned to the car and drove downtown to the police station, where he asked for a driver's license application. He asked the uniformed woman in the license bureau if Hal was around. She didn't know any Hal. There wasn't any Hal Good on the force. Joe took the application and the driver's manual and left.

He went to a nice older restaurant on Governor Street, not too far from where Hal was supposed to live, and was pleased to discover that the woman from the park was his waitress. She smiled in a friendly way and recommended the ravioli. It was very good, as was the Italian wine. It was a relaxed kind of place, frequented by older students and professors, as far as Joe could tell. It wasn't very busy. The waitress, Rita, chatted with him in a cheerful, mildly flirtatious way, and so he pleasantly passed the time until dark.

He drove back to the park and changed into a dark blue jogging outfit of sweatpants, sweatshirt, and running shoes. Over the sweatshirt he wore a dark windbreaker, and after a moment's reflection he slipped a Smith & Wesson .38 revolver into his pocket. It was the Bodyguard Airweight model, and despite its appellation it was a little heavy, but he had never found anything to recommend a lighter caliber in his line of work, and this gun had a shrouded hammer to prevent snagging in the pocket.

He walked down through the weeds and alder brush until he reached the back of the property he had scouted. There was a heavy wire fence and a doghouse in the backyard but no sign of a dog. He had noticed the doghouse earlier. Where was the dog? In the house? Perhaps Hal had once owned a dog but no longer.

He sat in the bushes for a long time, two hours by his watch, until a convertible came along Black Street and turned into the driveway behind the Blazer. A man got out of the passenger seat, and a woman got out from behind the wheel. The man fitted the Fat Man's admittedly limited description of Hal Good. The woman was very young, perhaps a teenager, with long dark hair, wearing jeans and a man's sport jacket that was too big for her. The man carried a bag of groceries, and the girl, two cartons of Mexican beer in bottles.

There were no welcoming barks from a dog when the couple entered the house. That was good. The lights went on, and through the curtained windows of the kitchen Joe could see the man and the girl, evidently making supper.

Joe sat quietly. After a while, when it was well into the evening, he saw the waitress, Rita, return in a Volkswagen and park across the street. She hauled out the little girl, who seemed to be asleep, and carried her into the darkened house. The lights came on. Joe stood and stretched. All along the quiet street there were lights in the little frame houses. People came out and walked their dogs. Across the street he could see Rita occasionally passing a window. He decided that the applicable epithet for her was statuesque. The mild traffic noise of the town ebbed and waxed, ebbed and ebbed some more.

The lights in the house Hal and his girlfriend had entered were still on in the kitchen. He saw the couple standing by the window where the sink must be. Washing up, he thought. Finally lights went on upstairs. There were no more dog walkers. A group of boys who had been tossing a football under the streetlights at the end of the block wandered off.

A man came out onto the porch of a house across the street, two doors from Rita's, and stretched. He lighted a cigarette and crossed over into the park. He walked no more than twenty feet before stopping to urinate, then he walked home. In all this time not more than five cars had come to park on the street, all of their occupants bustling into their houses.

Joe wondered if the girl would leave. He walked around quietly and carefully to ease his boredom and to keep from getting chilled. When the time rolled around to midnight and most of the lights on the street had gone out, he decided that the girl must be spending the night. That complicated things. He went back to his car and changed into his usual pants and shirt and a sweater and drove away. It would have been nice, he thought, to have caught Hal at home in the afternoon, alone.

He went to a bar uptown that was filled with college students. The beer was excellent, and he had a good chance to pick up a lovely girl who seemed to think Joe was a young professor or something, but he kept his senses and took the opportunity to call the Fat Man in Detroit, just to report his progress.

The Fat Man was very excited. “Joe! Where you been? Carmine's about to flip. That crazy Hal blew away five guys last night. Talk about a loose cannon!”

“In Detroit?” Joe was puzzled. The behavior of Hal with the girl, his casual manner, didn't strike Joe as that of a man who had boldly shot down five men less than twenty-four hours before. It was possible, of course, but mystifying. Joe explained that he had found Hal—or at least someone who looked like Hal was supposed to look and was living in the house with the address that Hal had given the answering service. There was a girl at the house, Joe said, but he guessed under the strain of present circumstances he'd just have to go in, girl or no girl.

The Fat Man was all for it. “Don't forget the money, Joe. If you want, I could send a couple a guys down to help you out.”

“To help me out? Forget it, Fat.”

Of course, Joe thought, as he drove back to Black Street, the Fat Man is uneasy about my getting to the money first. But bring in a couple of his heavies? Joe knew he'd be lucky to get out of the house alive, money or no money, if he had some of Carmine's or Mitch's bozos backing him up. If Hal didn't get him, they sure would. It was a dicey game without them. But then he was delighted to see, as he cruised by Hal's house, that the convertible was gone. Not only that, there was a light shining through the opened drapes of the living room.

OK, Joe said to himself, time for a chat. He parked up on the next street, above the park, and pulled off his sweater. On went the armpit sling and into it the .38. He donned his tweed jacket and jauntily strolled back to Hal's house. On the porch he realized that the light he'd seen was really in the kitchen, not in the front room. He pressed the doorbell and took hold of the heavy storm door. To his surprise it was unlocked. My, my, he thought, this Hal is careless. He was about to try the front door itself when it swung open and the girl, dressed in nothing more than a man's too-large shirt, said, “Dope! It's open.”

Joe slammed her in the chest with a straight-arm, and she fell against the foot of a staircase with a squeal. He was in. He closed the door behind him, the .38 in his hand.

There was little to imagine about the girl as she sprawled before him. Before she could yell, Joe stepped between her legs and clutched her throat.

“Damn it all, anyway,” he said regretfully and gestured with the pistol for her to get up. She got to her feet shakily, her eyes and her mouth forming huge O's. He spun her around and jammed her against the door of the hall closet. Her face was mashed against the door, and she whimpered.

“Where's Hal?” Joe demanded.

“Nnngh.” She shook her head uncomprehendingly.

She didn't know what Joe was talking about, he saw. He kept her pressed there at arm's length and glanced up the stairs, then danced to his left and peeked into the darkened living room. “It's open,” she'd said. Obviously Hal had gone out. For what? More beer?

For an awful moment it occurred to Joe that he was in the wrong house. This was not Hal's house. This was some cop's house, a cop not named Hal. Could this be the cop's girlfriend, or even—pray it wasn't so—the cop's wife? What the hell had made him believe it was Hal's house?

Nothing for it now. He jammed the barrel of the pistol into the base of the girl's skull, her fine black hair flowing around his hand, and reached back to lock the front door.

“Oh-m'god-please-don't-kill-me,” she whispered woefully.

“In here,” Joe said, dragging her into the living room. He released her, and she sagged to her knees before him in a dark corner, staring up at him. “Who the hell are you?” Joe asked, trying to modulate the anger and tension in his voice.

“Kathy,” she whispered. She held her hands before her as if praying.

“Kathy.” Joe had gotten command of his voice. “OK. What's your last name, Kathy?”

“Bunse.”

“Kathy Bunse. Fine. Who lives here, Kathy?”

“Art. Art, uh . . .” She seemed stymied for a moment, then she remembered and said, “Holbrook.”

“Oh,” Joe said, sighing. He lowered the pistol until it was pointed at the floor, almost as if he'd relaxed. “Art Holbrook. Are we talking about Art Holbrook the cop?”

She shook her head. “Art's not a cop.”

“Good,” said Joe. “So, ah, Kathy, . . . where is Art?”

“He went to the little store, for cigarettes and, and beer,” she said. She lowered her hands and rested them on her thighs.

“That's good,” Joe said. He extended his left hand and helped her up. “Sit down, Kathy. Right over there.” He gestured with his gun toward a chair that was in the dark shadow of the room. “Just be quiet and let's wait for Art. OK?”

She scrambled to the chair and sat, pulling the shirt down over her pelvis to hide her crotch. She sat, wide-eyed, and watched as Joe moved back to the entry and stood with his back to the wall, next to the front door, the gun held at waist level now.

Things settled down. There was no sound. Actually there were some sounds . . . a radio, or a phonograph, was playing upstairs. Not very loud. Some kind of mood music, a mindless, vaporous hush of synthesizer and bass. The refrigerator was cycling. The gas furnace was breathing. The girl was breathing rapidly, or was it himself? She took a deep breath finally, and Joe understood that she had regained her courage and was going to talk. He shook his head at her silently. But she only paused before asking, “Are you going to kill him?”

“No,” Joe said. “Shut up.”

His ears picked up something. Something had happened. A door? No. A car. A car had slowed, then driven by.

Joe stood in the little alcove of the entry for about ten minutes before asking the staring girl, “How far is this little store?”

Before she could answer, a man's upper body appeared at the floor level of the entryway between the living room and the dining room, and his extended arm held a pistol. The head craned for a fatal second, looking for a target.

Joe did not hesitate. He fired three times as rapidly as he could squeeze the trigger, a horrendous flash and crash filling the room. The man managed one wild, evidently convulsive squeeze, and the thin pop of a .22 was lost in the reverberations of the .38. Then he rolled sideways with a groan and lay still. The gun fell from his hand.

This time the girl did scream, and Joe backhanded her as he skipped by. She crumpled into the corner, sobbing, as Joe kicked the fallen pistol away from the outstretched hand and knelt over the man.

He turned the man's head. His eyes were glazing and he gasped. A froth of bubbly blood issued from his mouth. All of Joe's shots had struck the man: one in the upper chest, a lung shot; another in the left shoulder; and a third in the face, tearing away most of the left cheek and left ear and laying bare the maxilla. Blood was spattered up the jamb of the entry and now began to ooze sluggishly from the facial wound.

“Damn, damn, damn,” Joe muttered, cursing the man for a stupid son of a bitch. He wheeled to the girl. “Get a towel, anything . . . hurry!”

The girl scrambled up and raced into the kitchen. Joe realized suddenly how idiotic that command had been, and he bolted after her, slipping on the spreading blood. She was halfway through the back door when he caught her. He grabbed her by the hair and hauled her to her butt on the kitchen tiles, kicking the door shut as he did so.

“Aagh!” she screamed, and he had to clutch her throat again to silence her. He stuck the gun in her face and somehow levered her upright. “Get the goddamn towel,” he rasped.

They both looked wildly about the kitchen. Then as one they snatched at a dish towel hooked through the refrigerator door handle. Joe let her take it, and they moved swiftly back to the dying man. The girl knelt and tentatively reached for the man's head, but it looked so ruined and painful that she couldn't touch him. She looked up at Joe, weeping, and said, “We've got to get help.”

“Nothing can help him now,” Joe said flatly. “He's dead.”

The man clawed agonizingly at his shirt, ripping the buttons off and revealing the oozing hole where the most serious blow had hit. His face looked atrocious, but it was nothing. He'd taken a bad hit in the lungs, and it must have severed some vital artery or vein. He was drowning.

He arched his back, and his eyes focused briefly on Joe, bending over him. “Gol—” he gurgled. He shook his head as if trying to clear it. Then he lost it.

He relaxed utterly. He didn't die right away. It took a long time. Perhaps three minutes.

The girl was hysterical, sobbing and lying curled up on the dining room carpet. Her head was pressed against a heavy carved leg of the massive dining room table. Joe sat back on his heels and watched them both. He observed her buttocks. They were round and smooth, but there was a pimple or some reddish thing on the left cheek. He noticed the abandoned disposition of Hal's body. Joe cocked his head, listening. There were no external sounds of doors slamming, of voices, of sirens. Only the sudden cessation of the furnace's respiration. The refrigerator had quit cycling. The mindless music still trickled down from upstairs, now with a deep, hushed, resolving electronic bass. The hair around the girl's vagina was coarse and clotted with a dried whitish substance. It caught the kitchen light, which fell across her buttocks and her lover's ruined face in a yellow swath.

There was a final little burbling rush, then an issue of bright blood from the man's mouth. His feet twitched. He collapsed into the deep relaxation of death.

Joe pulled the girl upright and embraced her, smoothing her hair with his free hand. She hugged him desperately, sobbing, until she finally took a huge breath that pressed her breasts against his chest and he sensed a certain tension take command of her body. She drew away from him. Without a word Joe took her by the hand and led her up the stairs to the bedroom. He made her lie down on the bed and covered her with a quilt. She lay there passively, staring up into the light while Joe moved methodically about the room, opening drawers, looking.

Finally he sat down on the bed and looked at the girl. She continued to stare at the ceiling. She was indeed a teenager, he saw, not more than eighteen, if that. Her face was deadly calm, though tears leaked from the corners of her eyes.

“Do you want to live, Kathy?” Joe asked in a cool voice.

She nodded, tears staining her cheeks.

“Tell me what you know about Art.”

She knew very little. She spoke in a quiet, almost dreamy voice. Art was a lawyer, she said. He'd picked her up at a bar near campus a few days ago. She was a freshman at the University of Iowa. She came from Nebraska. She was going into journalism, she thought. Art came into the bar a lot, she said. Another girl she knew, Merilou, had gone out with him. Merilou had said that Art was rich and cool. He didn't try to feel you up right away, and he took his girlfriends to concerts and good dinners. A real nice guy. The convertible belonged to Art. She had spent the last two nights with him. He wasn't a cop, but she thought he had a lot of cop friends.

While she talked, Joe looked through a wallet he'd found on the dresser. It contained a driver's license for an Arthur H. Holbrook. There was an identification card from the Iowa Bar Association in the same name, along with a card made out to Art Holbrook as an auxiliary deputy sheriff of Johnson County. Joe had no idea what an auxiliary deputy might be. Perhaps it was nothing more than the kind of unofficial status that some law-enforcement groups confer on contributors to the Policemen's Benevolent Fund, or something. On the other hand, it could be a legal deputization, he supposed.

In the closet Joe found a shoe box. The girl fell silent as Joe emptied it of some fifty thousand dollars in old bills. Also in the box were three large plastic pill tubes filled with a white, powdery substance. Joe assumed this was cocaine, possibly heroin. He had never used either substance, but he thought he recognized it as cocaine. This would be a hell of a lot of cocaine, he thought. There were also two handsome briefcases in the closet, both of them containing .22-caliber Smith & Wesson marksman's pistols and ammunition. Joe set the shoe box and the briefcases on the dresser.

“Get up, Kathy,” he said quietly.

She stood there, shivering with fright, her hands clenched at her groin. She was spattered with blood, and her hair was tangled, but she was a pretty girl even as she blubbered and her features were blurred by weeping and terror.

“Take the shirt off, Kathy.”

Trembling, she slowly unbuttoned the shirt and let it fall about her heels. She looked at him hopelessly.

“Get dressed,” Joe said, gesturing at her clothes, which were scattered about the bed.

She quickly pulled on the panties and jeans and a colorful sweatshirt that had two gaudy toucans emblazoned on it. She didn't bother with the brassiere. While she slipped on her running shoes, Joe quietly explained that he had to lock her in the closet for a little while, but that if she kept quiet and didn't try anything foolish, he wouldn't harm her, and someone would come in an hour or so to let her out. Joe would be in the house for at least another hour, he told her, “cleaning up.”

She thanked him for not hurting her, and she went docilely into the closet after Joe had carefully searched it. He handed her a pillow and a blanket from the bed and closed the door. He jammed a chair under the doorknob. Then he went downstairs.

Joe looked at the dead man with casual interest. He had not wanted to kill, or even hurt, the man, but then he had to admit he had entered the man's house with a loaded pistol. What should he have expected? Still, there was no way he was going to confront Hal Good without a pistol in hand. He was determined, nonetheless, to feel no remorse, nor to allow himself to be affected at all—at least for now. Perhaps later, when he was sitting somewhere in security—he envisioned suite A/B of Amtrak's Zephyr—he could afford to reflect and expose himself to the emotional consequences of killing this man. He reckoned he would do that, but not now.

He didn't move the body, or even touch it, but peered at the face, distorted as it was. Joe didn't recognize him and didn't expect to. There wasn't anything to see. Just an ordinary-looking guy who had somehow got into a business that had made him a lot of money and had no doubt brought a good deal of excitement into his life, which was now prematurely ended.

For the next hour Joe carefully searched the house and turned up only one thing of additional interest. A telephone book with the number of the California answering service, next to which was written Hal Good. A little reminder. Another number, in Chicago, had the name Carl Stevens written by it. There were also numbers in Detroit, New York, Miami, and other large American cities. Often names were written out clearly, with addresses, such as “Sid, 3716 Fairlawn, Detroit,” or “Lande, 29970 Kelly Rd., Apt. 1, Detroit,” or “Tupman, 4200 Conner Towers,” and so on. It was amazing. Joe didn't like to take the book—it could be damning evidence if he were stopped—but he felt he had to, to show the Fat Man. And it might be worth something.

He considered doing a deep search—tearing up floors, dismantling the furnace and the heating ducts—but he had a feeling that if there was more money to be found, it wouldn't be much. Certainly not millions. There might be additional interesting information, but it wasn't worth the time it would take. Hal—or Art, as Joe was beginning to think of him—was supposed to be a professional, but Joe was leaning toward the view that he had been more lucky than anything else. He hadn't really covered his tracks very well, and he wasn't as careful as a working hitter should be. How had the man ever gotten into the business? Through a client he had defended, perhaps? It was a mystery. His obscure life-style had helped tremendously, and if he had a good liaison with the police, as it seemed, that, too. would be helpful. But Joe didn't see Art lasting much longer, whatever happened.

Anyway, the job was done. Joe had found his man, if not the money. He didn't want anything else here. The fifty thousand in the shoe box was owed him, he figured, for past services and for overfulfilling the contract on Hal. Not that he would mention the money to the Fat Man. It was of no use to Hal, that was for sure, and it obviously wasn't the skim that the Fat Man wanted. He decided to leave the two pistols, as well as the similar pistol that Hal had tried to use on him. They weren't his kind of artillery, and heaven only knew what crime scenes they had once adorned.

A light flickered through the darkened living room and caught Joe for a second. A horn tooted. Joe froze. The living room had two large picture windows in it, and the drapes were open. Joe darted to the edge of the window and caught a glimpse of the lights of a police squad car as it continued down Black Street. He realized it was just an ordinary patrol. Obviously some pals of Art Holbrook. They would have seen the upstairs light on and would, perhaps, have suspected what Art was up to. He glanced at his watch. It was barely two o'clock. He was surprised. He felt as if he had been in the house for hours.

Could the patrol have seen him standing in the dark room? Nah, he told himself. But it was time to move.

What to do with Kathy? She was a wonderful witness. She could definitely identify him—if he were ever brought before her (he had no police record, no photos or fingerprints on file). It would be a shame to kill a pretty, innocent girl like Kathy. But a sensible, careful man like Joe—unlike Art—had to think about such things. He sighed. This job was not unbounded fun. It struck him all of a sudden how convenient it would be if Kathy would just go blind. Of course, she could be blinded . . . Nah. Too stupid for words. Hell, when you considered it, damn-near everybody in Iowa City had seen him, including the woman across the street, Rita. He'd even been to the cop shop, asking after Hal Good. Should he go across the street and murder Rita and her wise-looking daughter? Should he kill the lady cop in the license bureau? Maybe he should kill everyone in Iowa City and track down that goddamn racist salesman who had given him a ride to Coralville and kill that son of a bitch, for sure. He laughed out loud. No, no, there was no need. They'd never make him. He was sure of it. But they were sure as hell going to have a terrific mystery on their hands for a while. They'd never begin to solve it. But, he thought sadly, he would never be able to come back to Iowa City. Such a pretty little town.

He got a can of Coke out of the refrigerator and took it upstairs to Kathy. She cowered when he opened the door, but she quickly realized he was just being thoughtful. “Hey, I'm taking off now, babe. You be cool, OK? I'll give the cops a ring in about a half hour, and they'll be by to let you out.”

He gathered up the shoe box and let himself out the back way. He walked into the park and stopped for a minute to urinate. There were some noises in the underbrush, a scuffling of old leaves, and he was startled to see two enormous, fat opossums rummaging about. They looked like overgrown rats but seemed oblivious to him. He zipped up, noticing that a light was still on in Rita's house, upstairs. Maybe she was reading in bed, or maybe the kid had to have a night-light.

Just then a squad car drove up rather quickly from Governor Street and pulled to the curb in front of Art Holbrook's house. Joe backed into the shadows of the trees and watched as a slender, black man in plain clothes got out and, accompanied by a uniformed policeman, approached the front door. It would take only a glance through the unshaded window to see the late Art Holbrook, Joe knew.

He walked to his car and drove calmly away. He had noticed Merilou's phone number in Art's book, and he'd planned to call her and tell her to help her friend Kathy, but now the police had forestalled that kindly gesture. Joe was disappointed.

Hours later he dropped the car at Midway Airport in Chicago and took a bus downtown, where he booked a roomette on the Amtrak to Detroit.